However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary

activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I

produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from
school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn
out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a
whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and
helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These
magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and
I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest
journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was
carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making
up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the
mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a
very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture
myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased
to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere
description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time
this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door
open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the
muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay
beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the
window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc.
etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my
non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right
words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will,
under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have
reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so
far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.
When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words,
i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost —
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my
backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the
need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind
of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books
at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy
endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of
purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own
sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote
when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can
assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early
development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in —
at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but
before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude
from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to
discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature
stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences
altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to
earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for
writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one
writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the
atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be
remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who
snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a
motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists,
artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short,
with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are
not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the
sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply
smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful
people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers
belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more
vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world,
or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the
impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the
rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is
valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a
lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet
words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he
may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level
of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out
true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest
possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other
peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again,
no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should
have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one
another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time
to time. By nature — taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained
when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives
would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or
merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my
political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of
pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian
Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of
failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the
first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in
Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but
these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political
orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of
1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that
I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma: